


Stay With Me

by juliesioux



Series: Exploring the Future [6]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Arrow - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Arrow speculation post 4x09, Coma, F/M, Injury, Near Death, Pain, olicity - Freeform, vague violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:12:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliesioux/pseuds/juliesioux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is speculation as to what Oliver's journey will be post 4x09.<br/>It provides more information to the piece, A Faint Hum, which is Felicity's journey through the same space.<br/>I wanted to explore some of Oliver's hidden spaces that he unknowingly shares with her. This is an example of how they never lose track of one another, no matter the circumstances.</p><p>It is part of the continuing exploration of the idea that they are more than just soul mates. That they are bound by a universal force that I think will play a part in the eventual defeat of Darhk.</p><p>Second part of A Faint Hum</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay With Me

**Stay With Me**

_There was no warning_  
_Just a soft sigh_  
_and the world upended_

_He was lost. To himself, to his team. His vision had restricted to a tiny pinpoint of light that illuminated Felicity and he dove headfirst after her, in the hopes that he could shield her from the violence that was chasing them._

Her tiny left hand rested gently between his large scarred ones, cold and still, as he tenderly stroked her knuckles in a circular pattern. Silently, he willed her to fight, to live, to not leave him, not yet, please, not yet...He felt a warm breeze push past him and he blinked hard as he snapped back to reality and the chaos their world had become.

He vaguely remembered arriving at the hospital, of someone who gently but firmly took her from his arms and placed her on a gurney where she laid, ghostly white and unnaturally still, in front of him like an offering to some dark God.

Robotically, he followed her down a short hallway as they rushed her to a trauma room, shouting out vital signs and her current condition to waiting nurses and doctors. The hospital lights were blinding in the small, equipment filled room. Instinctively, Oliver reached to shield her eyes in case she opened them. There was little he could do to help her now, but that one small thing felt like a gift the size of the world.

He assisted getting her transferred to the larger bed that would take her to surgery and then he was asked to step back. He knew he had to give the doctors and nurses room to work but every step he took away from her left scars on his already ravaged heart.

He remembered thinking about how he could smell the deep coppery scent of of her blood and wondered if it changed as a person died…then he remembered how black her blood had looked in the moonlight as she bled in his arms...

“We need to determine the path of the bullet. There is no exit wound,” he heard a doctor say quietly, “She is bleeding, bad, internally.”

His vision slowly fractured around the edges and his sanity would soon follow suit. From deep within him a slow burning rage was beginning to build. It was gaining power and size but he pushed it down, locked it away. Felicity needed him calm not bursting with rage. He would do that well away from this place, well away from her, where he could unleash the desire for revenge without consequence.

Oliver watched and listened to the team as they worked with skill and precision around her.

“What is her blood pressure?”  
“Here, get the IV line in while I get her neck stabilized.”  
“Is she allergic to anything? Is she taking any medications she may have left at work or at home?” asked someone to his left.  
“She takes birth control and is only allergic to nuts. You can ask her mom, I don’t think...you can ask her mom…,” he stammered, trailing off as he watched them xray her tiny frame.

A strange quiet had fallen over the room. There were so many people working on her and speaking in hushed tones yet all he could see was one of her hands. Oliver felt a wave of helplessness washing over him as he watched her small hand, a hand that had stayed his in moments of blind rage, a hand that had coaxed him into places of ecstasy he never thought possible, a hand that held his simply because she could, remain still in the midst of controlled chaos.

 _What if that is the last thing I see of her alive?_ he thought, as he felt a bubble of anguish push up through his body. _What if this is it? Just her hand? What if this is going to be all the time we are given?_

A fist of panic reached up and wrapped its icy fingers around his heart and images of her laughing on a beach in Bali surfaced in front of his eyes, a flash of her golden hair in the desert as they made their sojourn to Mesa Verde early in their journey away from Starling and towards each other. _Our story is far from over,_ he thought in despair, _this cannot be it..._

One of the nurses rubbed her knuckle into the centre of Felicity’s chest _(that tender spot he had kissed so many times)_ , calling to her, trying to coax her back to them, then she asked her to squeeze her hand if she could hear her but she remained unresponsive to both the physical and verbal stimuli.

“Come on, Felicity,” the nurse said quietly, “I will stop if you show me you can feel pain, give me a response, dear.”

Felicity responded with only the shallow rise and fall of her chest. _She was disappearing into her mind,_ he thought. He felt her retreat as clear as he felt the weight of her blood on his hands.

For just a brief moment, in the midst of the bedlam, there no one was beside her. The doctors and nurses were hovering over a series of x rays a few steps away and were getting ready to move her up to the operating theatre. If this was it, if this was the last time he was going to see her, he wanted to be sure she heard his voice.

Quickly and silently, he stepped next to her and slipped his hand loosely into hers, leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Felicity, I love you. You are the strongest person I know, you will survive this.”

He felt her grab his hand and with that, as though they were timed, every machine that was connected to her went off. Each alarm had a different pitch and cycle and the result was pure chaos.

Oliver moved quickly out of the way of the doctors, and slipped deeper and deeper into shock. He entered into a kind of fugue state, not unlike the one he experienced years ago in Hong Kong when he tortured and killed Shrieve as the Alpha/Omega virus spread through the streets, killing all who inhaled it. He purposefully stepped outside of himself and watched as Felicity teetered on the edge of life.

She had gone into cardiac arrest. The trauma team quickly pulled the defibrillator over to her side and readied it for use. He watched them cut away her blouse and her bra. He watched as they applied the conductive gel before they laid the paddles on her small, devastated torso _(how could such a small woman withstand so much violence? he wondered)_. He closed his eyes as the electric current passed through her heart returning it to a stable rhythm. Carefully, he opened his eyes and timed her heartbeat with his own.

All he wanted to do was to cover her, to give her back her dignity and protect her. _She shouldn’t be lying there half naked under the powerful emergency room lights_ , he thought. _She was helpless and at the mercy of strangers._

As though reading his mind, one of the nurses gently covered her with a paper sheet. But his anxiety was building, fuelling the underlying rage that would soon propel him to action and he felt his entire body beginning to shake with trapped energy.

Someone explained to him that the bullet had shattered as it entered her body after hitting one of her ribs. The carnage within the confines of her body was extensive, fixable, but extensive. Her liver, left kidney and spleen were all damaged. They suspect there were bullet fragments in her lung but would xray her again to be sure. She was bleeding internally and would die if they didn’t act fast.

He nodded blindly. His eyes were locked on Felicity as they secured her for travel up to the surgical ward. He saw a flash of her blonde hair then she was gone and he was left to step shakily through puddles of her blood in order to collect her shoes and glasses.

He wiped the blood from her shoes _(the blood will stain if I don’t take care of them, he thought, she will be upset if that happens)_ and remembered a night in Positano when she had spilled red wine down the front of one of her pale pink summer dresses, how it wound up in a heap on the floor as he kissed and licked her clean, rolling the taste of her mixed with the wine on his tongue...

The memory knocked the wind from his lungs and he stumbled just a bit and he grabbed onto the wall to steady himself as the noise of the ward grew to a deafening, chaotic pitch in his ears. His phone began to ring in his pocket which turned into a roar that threatened to break him when a light touch on his elbow snapped him back to reality.

“Mr. Queen?” asked a nurse with worry stamped across her face.  
“I’m fine. I may need to...step away...but if I do, I will be back. Don’t...when she wakes up...don’t let her worry about me.”  
“Do you have anyone at home to meet you?”  
Oliver cut the young woman a hard look and said, “I am not going home.”

The white hot rage that he had managed to keep down which now threatened to explode in a frenzy of blind and bloody violence. Once Donna arrived, he left and began  
to burn the city to ashes in order to find Darhk. He hunted and killed, without blinking or hesitating, he tore through the ranks of Ghosts as though they were made of paper. He allowed himself to drift into that hidden place deep within that hid the Killer that lurked behind the Warrior.

He only returned to himself when the call came that Felicity was out of surgery. The hours that followed were a blur of beeping alarms, blood and confusion. He remembered snippets of moments with doctors asking questions, nurses ushering him away so they could tend her in private, and of shared tears and uncertainty.

Ultimately, the only thing that mattered was Felicity. The surgery had been a success, she faced a few months of recovery to be sure, but it was a success. She just wasn’t waking up and they had no idea why. The doctors and nurses encouraged them to talk to her, to include her in any of the conversations they were having, to not talk about her in the third person as it could be possible she could hear them. They needed to include her as a participant and not as a vacant body.

As he watched Donna wipe her daughter’s face with a damp facecloth, Oliver felt the first of many tears prickling around the corners of his eyes. His world was drained of meaning, even the act of breathing had become laborious but he kept moving forward trying to find Darhk amongst the shadows.

______________________________________________________________________

Donna sat beside him, and softly spoke to the prone body of her daughter in the bed in front of them. She was telling Felicity about the time she thought she had used one of her computers to rob one of the casinos on the Strip in Vegas when she was eleven, not understanding that Felicity had created a realistic looking game that just simulated the crime.

She quietly told Oliver that she had expected the FBI to come knocking one day because she could not contain the growing intellect of her amazing daughter. She thought of her as indestructible, her golden child, with the world at her feet and fingertips.

He kept his head bowed and listened to her as she shared stories about Felicity. She spent hours talking about her daughter as she grew up and became the woman with whom he would fall in love. She was a singular, unique creation that sprung from the desert fully formed like Athena when she sprung from the head of Zeus in Donna’s mythology of her daughter’s origins.

His large, powerful body was battered and bruised from endless nights jumping off of rooftops, pummelling Ghosts, throwing them off of buildings, into electric fences or simply beating them to death with his fists as he carved a path of hate filled murderous rage through the city. Yet, even though he was comfortable and at ease in company of violence, he was terrified that the small blonde next to him would see his tears. He was awed by her strength and belief in both Felicity and him.

They sat in supportive silence as nurses gently moved her as they changed her dressing and cleaned her up from the ravages of the surgery. One of the nurses changed her IV and administered a low dose of morphine, as they felt she was showing signs of reacting to the pain associated with her internal wounds. Her breathing was still being assisted by a ventilator but otherwise,her vital signs were stabilizing.

“Her time hasn’t come yet, Oliver. Her wound will heal and she’ll be up and with that damn tablet in her hand, trying to run the world,” Donna said in a trembling voice, “just keep talking to her, gently and lovingly, Oliver, never leave her alone. She needs to hear your voice, she needs you...”

The first night he stayed with her, after everyone had gone and he was left alone with her, really and truly alone, that was when all his defences failed. He laid his head down next to her left hand and wept. He wept until he was hollow, until there was nothing left in him.

“Felicity,” he said, his voice thick and faltering, “our lives...our lives are just beginning. Before you, I was a hollow, angry man. Without you, honey...I don’t know where I could go or do to find even a fraction of the happiness you have brought me...to me…”

Another wave of anguish overtook him and he allowed the tears to flow. It was through this tidal wave of helplessness that he said, “Please...please don’t leave me...I am lost without you here, baby...I love you.”

Oliver felt her body jolt and before he could alert anyone, she crashed and every alarm on every machine went off.

Oliver was pushed out of the room as they team of doctors and nurses worked on her. He watched one nurse begin CPR as the defibrillator was rushed into the room and her body prepared for the violent electrical shock it would be receiving.

He sank slowly into a chair provided by an unseen nurse, closed his eyes and listened for the one beep that would assuage his fears. It took two attempts from the critical care team, but he heard what he was searching for first one beep _(he remembers how he laid his head on her chest while laying in their soft, tropical Bali bed and listened to her heart)_ and then another. He could step between them but they were her heartbeats.

When the duty nurse attempted to make him leave and go home to get some rest, Oliver pointedly reminded her that it was his family’s name on the the building they were in and it would take more than just an arbitrary set of rules to get him to leave.

It may have been the flat, iron cast tone of his voice or the how his eyes turned hard and unyielding, but the nurse nodded and went to find him a more comfortable chair and blanket.

He re-entered her room and approached her bed cautiously, as though his presence had created a disturbance around her, and tenderly took her left hand in his own and whispered, “ Felicity, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Bowing his head for just a moment, he collected himself and said, “Felicity, we all love you. Diggle, your mom, Thea...when you wake up, we will all be here for you.”

Careful so as to not dislodge any of the various wires or IV lines leading back and forth between her body and the machines tracking her fragile existence, Oliver laid a gentle kiss on her forehead.

“I just really need you to come back to me,” he said in a trembling voice as he pressed his forehead to hers, “you tether me to the person I am.”

Sitting quietly, trying to transfer his strength to her through contact, Oliver found himself humming old Russian folk songs under his breath. He had yet to truly open up about how he ascended the ranks of the Bratva to Captain to her, besides a few stories about Anatoly from the Island, and he was resolved to share that part of his story with her when she woke up. Until then, he could sing to her when words failed him.

He often thought about the songs he heard when he stayed with Anatoly and his family. The one that stuck with him was an old Russian love song that Anatoly’s elderly aunt would sing in the evening before heading off the bed. He couldn’t remember it all but it remained with him as a small comfort from those violent and turbulent times and he found himself humming it to Felicity.

It was called не уходи, Do Not Go, Stay With Me and it was mournful and lonely but full of such rich, vital meaning and love. One day he would have to find a recording and translation of it for them to play in the loft, until then he would hum it gently to her in the hopes he wasn’t too off key and she could grasp it and use it to pull her way home.

Before beginning it again, he whispered into her ear, “Felicity, I love you, please come back.”  
______________________________________________________________________

 _He sings to her from a distance_  
_a small figment in her mind’s eye_  
_reaching with sound to the bottom of the abyss._  
______________________________________________________________________

The days merged into one another and the nights were a flurry of falling bodies and faceless men. Diggle and Thea were worried that the longer Felicity remained in a coma, the deeper Oliver would sink into his own silent world where they could not reach him.

He teetered closer to the brink where he would have to make a choice: reclaim his soul or let go and let the darkness take him. In truth, he had no idea who he was becoming or if he had the strength to take the step back into the skin of the world he had created with her. He had no balance, no path to follow without her.

“I’m trying to be the man I know I am because of you,” he confessed, “but I am losing myself to the darkness, the same darkness I brought back with me from Lian Yu. Your mom is...she has faith in you, hon, I can see where you get your strength from. We love you and will wait for as long as it takes.”

The tears fell again at this point and he sank back into the easy chair they had brought into the room. Before drifting off, he took her hand in his and he wondered if the light they had on above her was shining in her eyes. It was so bright compared to the other lights. His last thought before sleep gathered him close was that maybe he should move it.

Later that morning, somewhere around 3 am, Felicity’s heart began to beat out of control before it once again stopped. Oliver woke with a start as her hand was snatched away from his and her small, desperately fighting body was once again contorted by electrical current.

______________________________________________________________________

 _He reached out to find her_  
_and grasped only air_  
_the world fell away_  
_the world fell away_  
_and the searched for the light_  
_and held on and on_  
_he held on_

______________________________________________________________________

It had been days since her heart had stopped and Felicity seemed to be rebounding. Her body was healing but she was buried in some secret room in her mind. Her brain waves were active and moving at lightning speed but at the wrong frequency. All they could do was wait. He had faith that she would come back. Faith in her.

He was desperate to see her eyes again. To see the way the night sky reflected in their depths. To ignore the passage of time in the way she gazed up at him in the mornings when he would join their bodies in a gentle rhythm. He longed to hear her voice. The way she sighed his name like a caress or how she laughed at his terrible jokes. It was music to his ears, a salve or balm for his soul.

He was tired, bone weary from nights of stalking Darhk and annihilating his ranks one Ghost at a time. The seemingly endless supply of rage fueled him but his body was tired. Laying his head on her hand, Oliver hummed the sad Russian tune that kept them company in the otherworldly hours of the morning when the sky had ripples of colours at the edges.

“Не уходи, побудь со мною,  
Здесь так отрадно, так светло!  
Я поцелуями покрою уста, и очи, и чело!  
Я поце луями покрою уста, и очи, и чело!  
Побудь со мной, побудь со мной!”

After the first verse, Oliver fell asleep and started to dream about an oceanless beach surrounded by a misty nothingness. Felicity was in the distance and he raced to get to her before the light took her away into an unreachable void.

______________________________________________________________________________

 _he dreams of a coyote_  
_that howls his frustration_  
_to an invisible moon_  
_and he wades through the desert_  
_racing to rejoin the stars in the sky_  
______________________________________________________________________________

Oliver is once again humming the Russian song and tenderly tracing a circular pattern over and over on her knuckles. He is deep in his mind, reliving the moment they first met and trying to figure out just how to tell her of when he first saw her in his father’s office. He fails to see her open her eyes but he does feel the jerk of her hand.

It snapped him back to the present and while he is is at first overwhelmed with relief and joy, he sees her reaching to remove the intubation tube from her throat and the room filled with doctors and nurses. Someone gave her a sedative to calm her down enough so they could remove the tube without injuring her.

Oliver waited in the hallway, lowered his head and wept for joy. Donna and Diggle found him seated in a chair next to her door with his head in hands.

“Oliver? Oliver, what is it, man?” Diggle asked, his voice full of panic and alarm.  
“She’s back. She’s awake, Diggle,” he said in a hushed voice, “she’s come back.”  
Donna squealed and wrapped him in a hug that threatened to crush his bones and it reminded him that this tiny blonde had wrapped his and Felicity’s world with more love and support than he knew could exist.

“Donna,” he said with a small hitch in his voice, “she made it back.”  
“She did, Oliver, she did!” she exclaimed before turning to draw Diggle into a family hug.

Later, the doctor sat them down to explain the intricacies of recovering from a coma, even ones as short as Felicity’s. There was a lot they didn’t understand about what happens when patients are comatose, she described it as a neverending dream space for some and a blank slate of nothingness for others. They had no idea yet what Felicity experienced but patience and rest would be needed to get her back to optimum health.

That night as the team narrowed their search for Darhk, Oliver was ambushed by a team of Ghosts. He fought with renewed vigor and the half men fell at his feet but he found himself pushing the rage aside and fighting for something different than revenge and retribution. It was during the dying moments of the attack, when Oliver had the victory clear in hand, that he looked over the precipice and made the choice to fight for himself, for the man he felt he was destined to be and not the one he had been told he could only become. He walked away from the still warm and living bodies of Darhk’s men and into the light of day knowing from that moment on, he could fight for more than just hate and rage, that he could be his own source of strength and courage.

 _That night, when he rejoined Felicity, he eased into sleep and dreamt of a misty forest and a cool, glittering stream. He could smell the soft jasmine scent of the blossoms that surrounded it. He was overcome by its peace and tranquillity and knows that his tears will infuse the earth with the love he shares with her. From the depths of the stream, Felicity rose and beckoned him to join her._  
______________________________________________________________________

 _his footfalls echo and shake the land_  
_as he makes his way past the crest of the hill_  
_that leads him back to her_  
______________________________________________________________________

 

He was sitting, holding her hand and staring out the window, and once again  softly humming the old Russian song. It had become part of his daily meditation at her bedside. It calmed and focused him in the long hours when Felicity slept.

He was covered in bruises, his face a roadmap of fist strikes and his body a study in impacts with pavement and brick walls. His hands were swollen and sore but he tenderly held onto Felicity’s as though they were made of spun glass.

He was lost in the tune, following its notes through the hallways of his memories, trying to tease out of the shadows he had allowed to take root ;and he searched for that one piece of information that might allow him and his team to defeat Darhk and HIVE. It was in there somewhere, he could feel it as though it had just brushed past him and all he had to do was reach out and...

“Oliver?” a voice hoarse from disuse called to him, “Oliver?”  
And he lost himself in the beauty of her rejoining him in this world and their shared future. He reassured her that he had been at her side, laughed softly at her teasing his obvious lie, and gently loving her with his whole heart and soul. He gently kissed her palm and knew they would always, regardless of distance or circumstance, find one another.

As he watched her sleep, he tethered his heart to her once more knowing now that he had the ability to fight in the light through his own inner well of strength and determination. She would always be his guiding force, the element that balanced him, but he had found his way back to himself for her instead of because of her.

  _She had found him even though she had been trapped on the other side of consciousness, thinking she had lost me_ , he mused, _when I was the one who was truly lost without her._

**Author's Note:**

> The song in its original Russian and the translation I struggled for hours to make sure was as close to right as possible. All mistakes in the English version are all mine.
> 
> The Russian version...  
> Не уходи  
> by Nikolai Zubov
> 
> Не уходи, побудь со мною,  
> Здесь так отрадно, так светло!  
> Я поцелуями покрою уста, и очи, и чело!  
> Я поце луями покрою уста, и очи, и чело!  
> Побудь со мной, побудь со мной!
> 
>  
> 
> Не уходи, побудь со мною,  
> Я так давно тебя люблю.  
> Тебя я лаской огневою и обожгу, и утомлю.  
> Тебя я лаской огневою и обожгу, и утомлю.  
> Побудь со мной, побудь со мной!
> 
>  
> 
> Не уходи, побудь со мною!  
> Пылает страсть в моей груди.  
> Восторг любви нас ждет с тобою, не уходи, не уходи!  
> Восторг любви нас ждет с тобою, не уходи, не уходи!  
> Побудь со мной, побудь со мной!
> 
> The English translation...  
> Do Not Go, Stay With Me  
> By Nikolai Zubov
> 
> Do not go, stay with me,  
> It's so gratifying, so bright!  
> I kiss the lips and eyes and foreheads!  
> I will cover the mouth and the eyes and the forehead!  
> Stay with me, stay with me!
> 
>  
> 
> Do not go, stay with me,  
> I've Loved You So Long.  
> With tenderness and fire both shall burn you, and I shall tired.  
> With tenderness and fire both shall burn you, and I shall tired.  
> Stay with me, stay with me!
> 
> Do not go, stay with me!  
> Burning passion in my chest.  
> The delight of love is waiting for us with you, do not go, do not go!  
> The delight of love is waiting for us with you, do not go, do not go!  
> Stay with me, stay with me!
> 
> Here is a link to a gorgeous version of the song.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW9pL1w83w


End file.
